Low expectations

Saturday 9 June 2007 19.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 9 June 2007 19.01 EDT

This final part of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy occupies much the same terrain as The Sportswriter (1986) and the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day (1996) - the same peregrinations around suburban New Jersey, the same pondering of big questions disguised as small ones, the same hard-thought philosophies disguised as uplifting, small-town nostrums. But no one can complain about that.

Frank is now 55, still selling real estate, but recovering from prostate treatment, thus adding thoughts of mortality to his habitual obsessing about his ex-wife, Ann, the loss of his first child, his sense of neglect in parenting the others, Clarissa and Paul, who are grown up and displaying the tagged baggage of their younger selves.

Frank negotiates this phase of his life with more optimism than seems entirely due. Along with his health scare, his second wife, Sally, has walked out on their happy marriage under outlandish circumstances, his business partner Mike Mahony is looking to strike out in a new direction and Thanksgiving is looming, with the promised return of Clarissa (a lesbian 'trying out' men) and unreachably 'zany' Paul, who, to Frank's secret dismay, now writes greetings-card captions for the Hallmark company.

As in the first two Bascombe books, events unfold over a public holiday ('Americans are hardwired for something to be thankful for. Our national spirit thrives on invented gratitude,' observes Frank), grounding things in locality and family. It's the eve of the new millennium, too, with America frozen in the shadow of the 'hijacked' election that marked the interregnum between Clinton and Bush. But these larger elements, with their promise of uncertain change, are never the story, merely a reminder of it. History is always personal. National debate is played out in comedic bar-room fisticuffs; a bomb in the hospital cafeteria registers less pressingly with Frank than finding somewhere to pee.

As Ford's admirers will expect, The Lay of the Land is verbally sumptuous, slow-paced, compendious, funny and unfashionably hopeful. It brings a sense of resolution for Frank, who learns to expect less from life simply because there's less of it left. Not everyone would find relief in that.